This could potentially be a nightmare for mobile developers for many reasons, but a huge one is that different technical giants are using different approaches and different frameworks. This limits or excludes any interoperability.

A new service is working on making this all a bit easier. Fritz offers an end-to-end solution for adding machine learning models to mobile apps and having them run natively on the device. There are apps already using Fritz during the private beta period. PlantVillage, which uses on-device machine learning to detect evidence of crop diseases in East Africa and gives farmers advice for how to treat them, is one.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.